The New York Times OP-ED

Monday, May 24, 1999

Essay

William SAFIRE

CLINTON'S COMPULSION

Washington - We have a President who has a problem: he lies when he doesn't really have to.

This mysterious compulsion is not to be confused with the rational falsehood. His finger-wagging denial of a sexual relationship last year was designed to cut off further inquiry, and he could logically assume at the time he would not be contradicted by hard evidence. It was a calculated deception by a well-ordered brain.

The deceptions this year are different. Not only were the misleading statements made about the weightiest matters -- war and national security -- no purpose was served in uttering them.

That's the puzzling part.

For example, on March 24, he said: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." He reiterated that policy time and again.

Vice President Gore dutifully followed his line when asked in April, "Are there any circumstances under which you would support using American ground troops?" Gore replied: "That option is not under consideration . . . that option was removed from consideration."

Clinton was criticized immediately by Senator John McCain and in this space for taking the potential use of troops off the table at the start. Even Clinton supporters now concede that the President erred by giving Slobodan Milosevic an assurance against invasion. When the leader of the Western alliance, Britain's Tony Blair, told Clinton recently that ground troops must at least be assembled, and when the NATO commander argued that the bombing alone would not accomplish the mission, Clinton properly changed his policy.

But he could not bring himself to say forthrightly that the time had come for such new pressure on Serbia.

Instead, he insisted that he had "always said . . . that we have not and will not take any option off the table."

That's just not so, and everybody knows it. Why does he do it? Does he imagine that nobody will remember what he has been saying all along?

His diehard defenders explain that his words "to fight a war" limited the meaning of "do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo." Under that parsing, he intended only to put them in a "permissive environment."

That's demonstrably untrue, too. His Secretary of State says that the 50,000 NATO troops might well be used in a "non-permissive environment." (That euphemism for invasion means "a place where soldiers shoot at you." When is NPE Day?)

Another example of the unnecessary lie was his March 19 response to: "Can you assure the American people that under your watch, no valuable nuclear secrets were lost?"

We now know that he had been briefed last November about the F.B.I. and C.I.A. suspicions, and in January had received the secret Cox committee report detailing security lapses during the Clinton "watch."

Clinton carefully rephrased the question: "Can I tell you that there has been no espionage at the labs since I have been President? I can tell you that no one has reported to me that they suspect such a thing has occurred." And again: "To the best of my knowledge" (he wasn't even under oath) "no one has said anything to me about any espionage which occurred by the Chinese against the labs during my Presidency."

A deliberate deception. On NBC's "Meet the Press" on May 9, Tim Russert extracted from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson an admission that Clinton was "fully, fully briefed" on espionage in "past and present Administrations." Clinton aides evidently savaged Richardson for letting the truth be badgered out of him. On ABC's "This Week" yesterday, that Vice Presidential hopeful threw his credibility on his sword, telling Sam Donaldson the President was "correct" in his deception. Here's why Clinton inserted "at the labs" and "against the labs" in his answers. As Richardson lamely explained: "we don't know whether it came from our labs."

Thus does the requirement to cover the President's slippery prevarications corrupt everyone loyal to him.

In time, the truth will out, but deeper questions will remain: Why the Clinton compulsion to pretend he never makes a mistake? Why the sneaky word games when the truth is sure to come out? What mental process accounts for his strange habit of unnecessary denial?